Wednesday, May 17, 2017

"Leftists" aren't the only pro-Islam Westerners

I've always noted that Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch tended to fixate on "Leftism" as the primary, if not only, culprit for the Problem of the Problem (the primary problem being Islam, of course; the secondary problem being the West's persisting myopia about the primary problem). But I've had the distinct impression that this fixation of his has become stronger in recent years.

This week, during his visit to Iceland and after his speaking engagement while out in a restaurant in Reykjavik, Spencer was poisoned when someone slipped some kind of drug into his drink. As Spencer recounts it:

...after the event, when my security chief, the organizers of the event, and Jihad Watch writer Christine Williams, who had also been invited to speak, went with me to a local restaurant to celebrate the success of the evening.
At this crowded Reykjavik establishment, I was quickly recognized. A young Icelander called me by name, shook my hand, and said he was a big fan. Shortly after that, another citizen of that famously genteel and courteous land also called me by name, shook my hand, and said “F**k you.”
We took that marvelous Icelandic greeting as a cue to leave. But the damage had already been done. About fifteen minutes later, when I got back in my hotel room, I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet. I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.

Spencer goes on to speculate astutely that it was probably the seemingly friendly greeter who was the poisoner -- not only because he was closer by, but also because his friendliness would be an obvious ploy to get closer and not arouse suspicion (one cannot help think of the excruciatingly related problem of friendly Muslims vibrantly teeming -- and growing -- throughout our Western societies). Or perhaps the two greeters -- the seemingly friendly one and the obviously hostile one slinging the F word at Spencer -- were in collusion: the latter distracting Spencer and his friends (and bodyguard), the former taking advantage of the distraction to slip in (another relevant similarity to our broader problem with Muslims, where we (including the Counter-Jihad) become distracted by the Bad Cop Muslims (or even some of the Good Cop Muslims who are too transparent to be genuine) while ignoring the deeper cover and stealth jihad of the Better Cops (e.g., Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Asra Nomani, etc. etc., et al. qaeda...).

Skip ahead, after the hospital and contacting the police, Spencer's description continues:

Iceland is a small country. Everyone knows everyone else. And so as it happened, I was quickly able to discover the identity, phone number, and Facebook page of the primary suspect, the young man who claimed he was a “big fan.” I don’t intend to call him. Icelandic police will be contacting him soon enough, if they haven’t done so already.

Now here comes the part of Spencer's description where his fixation on "Leftists" seems irrational:

However, I did look at his Facebook page, and as I expected, I saw nothing that might indicate that he really was a “big fan” of my work, or that he held any views out of the mainstream — which is, courtesy of Iceland’s political and media elites, dominated entirely by the Left. [bold emphasis mine]

Let's isolate that bolded part:

I saw nothing that might indicate that ... he held any views out of the mainstream.

This statement, and the tenor of the entire piece by Spencer (and countless other editorial introductions he has penned at Jihad Watch over the months and years), implies that Spencer believes the Mainstream is Leftist. That's one way to explain our surreal situation where nearly the entire West is bending over backwards to anxiously avoid being "Islamophobic" -- but I see that as being a variation of the "No True Scotsman Fallacy" (see my essays on this problem, The "No True Scotsman" Fallacy as well as No True Scotsman, redux).

It implies, among other things, that no non-Leftists exist who are PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalists). Thus, any time we happen to encounter an otherwise non-Leftist thinker or pundit who shows that he or she swallows and regurgitates the PC MC memes like a goldfish swallowing water and blithely blowing bubbles, we must automatically assume they must be a "Leftist" -- even if otherwise, they aren't.

Or, we could apply Ockham's Razor rather than recklessly cutting Gordian's Knot, and contemplate whether there is not a deeper, broader, more complex problem afoot in the West that has spanned not only decades, but centuries.

For one thing, how would we explain a Michel de Montaigne, philosopher and statesman who lived in the 16th century long before there even existed "Left" and Right", nevertheless articulating PC MC with startling similarity to the "Leftists" of our time?

And that's just one out of scores of examples I've come across over the years. Another is the Voegelinian society of Academics -- diehard Reagan supporters and anti-Communists in fidelity to the philosophy of their mentor, philosopher Eric Voegelin. And yet for all that, repeating many of the PC MC shibboleths, as I have documented on my blog. I mean, when a Counter-Jihadist irritably blurts out that Republican General & President Eisenhower and Republican businesswoman and later VP pick for the 2016 Presidential race by none other than the Republican heartthrob Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, are "Leftists" -- since both of these conservatives indeed praised Islam to the skies -- you know something has broken down with the terminology here, and people are not adjusting their paradigm lenses to take in a sociopolitical reality that has shifted outside of their horse-blinkered perspective.

Not to mention the tangy irony that Robert Spencer himself seems to harbor deep PC MC reflexes when he anxiously avows that he is "not anti-Islam" and "not anti-Muslim" and to boot, expresses sincere belief in the viable existence of "reformer" Muslims.

Now -- back to the Icelandic would-be assassin: Certainly, to actually poison a leading "Islamophobe" like Spencer is an act of going above and beyond the call of PC MC duty, indicative of an ideological fervor more ardent than the typical PC MC (despite what Spencer apparently believes, all too common throughout the West). So on that basis alone -- the violent act perpetrated against Spencer to frighten or silence him -- the assailant could reasonably be said to be actually Leftist (since Leftism is a more virulent form of the more diffusely decaffeinated PC MC). But to point to the assailant's Facebook page and note that he did not hold "any views out of the mainstream" as though that were confirming evidence of his Leftism... that just shows that Spencer has a grievously simplistic understanding of PC MC, the fashionably dominant worldview throughout the West that continues to defend Islam and in various ways to penalize those who are trying to sound the alarm bells about Islam.